An evening with Masao Adachi
March 20, 2015
7:00 pm
A.K.A. Serial Killer
Masao Adachi, 1969, 86 min
https://0xdb.org/0239925
9:00 pm
The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu,
Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images
Eric Baudelaire, 2011, 66 min
https://0xdb.org/2006160
10:00 pm
It May Be That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve: Masao Adachi
Philippe Grandrieux, 2011, 73 min
https://0xdb.org/2007401
CAMP rooftop: http://studio.camp/campstudio.html
CAMP and Pirate Cinema Berlin invites you to a rooftop screening of three films directed, populated and inspired by Masao Adachi. An evening without Adachi, for certain: the 75-year old filmmaker cannot leave Japan, since he has spent years in jail for passport violations in connection with a series of airplane hijackings in the 1970s. Also an evening without most of his images: they were destroyed in Beirut in 1982. Adachi knows that he could have made more films, but as a heavy drinker, he also knows that it might have cost him his life. In 1971, Nagisa Oshima, Koji Wakamatsu, Yoshida Kiju and Masao Adachi, on their way back from the Cannes Film Festival, decide to make a stopover in Palestine. They get to Beirut, and Adachi will stay there for 27 years, as part of the Japanese Red Army faction of the PLFP, in hiding, in jail - the one-man film-making wing of the armed struggle, and the one man who meant it literally when he said: Guerrilla Cinema.
Cinema without Adachi, mostly, until in 2011 Eric Baudelaire and Philippe Grandrieux make two astonishing and entirely unexpected films, not about, but rather with and through Adachi. Baudelaire strikes a pact: Adachi cannot return to Beirut, so he will lend him his eyes, trace the skyline and coast, account for images lost, shots never taken and stories left untold. What Adachi says about "AKA Serial Killer" -- in order to make a political documentary, no script is needed, just a camera to film the urban landscape, its transformation, the concrete shape of political power -- applies to Baudelaire's film as well. Beirut won't let him down: decades of struggle peel off the shelled-out buildings, entire continents of unseen cinema glisten in the sun by the Corniche, and Adachi's letters provide the distance in time and space across which the images do what images do best: set forth a motion, travel.
Grandrieux -- infamous for his features "Sombre" (1998) and "La vie nouvelle" (2002), a cinema of dark intensity often mistaken for just another color within the 1990s French New Wave of extreme sex and violence -- in 2011 announces that he is going to make a series of political documentaries. His first one is a journey to Tokyo where he meets Adachi. Grandrieux won't stray far from his style: keep the camera on somebody's neck until your heart beats faster, point it at a tree in a light that will make your breath stop. Where Baudelaire's film stays half-wide, Grandrieux gets close, a series of bodies in the city, nightly highway rides and voices from the back seat. Adachi keeps narrating as he keeps walking and drinking, and when the film reaches its end, what opens up is an entire alternative future of political documentary: one in which the image is no longer an easily transportable form of truth, but a force that returns to and re-emerges from the material world of sensations.
